If you're a certain age, Melissa Joan Hart will be an indelible part of your childhood. Her TV show, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, was an endless font of positive adolescent reinforcement, reassuring you that whoever you were – a human, a witch, a witch's oddly stilted on-off boyfriend, a jerky animatronic cat that had no real reason to be as abrasive as it was, a witch's aunt who seemed to be in thrall to the beauty of her own neck – you were special.

Except, this apparently isn't the case. Nobody is special, it turns out, not even Melissa Joan Hart. She has just become the first high-profile celebrity to fail to have a movie funded by Kickstarter. After the Veronica Mars film raised over $2m in less than a day from the crowdfunding website, and Zach Braff achieved a similar feat with his apparently highly anticipated Garden State follow-up Wish I Was Here, it must have seemed like any old celebrity could saunter up and collect millions of dollars from their adoring fans with the first idea that crossed their mind.

But no. Hart's pitch for a film called Darci's Walk of Shame – essentially "Give me two million dollars and I'll show those Hollywood assholes what they're missing by not casting me in an insipid-looking romcom" – only managed to scrape together $51,605 before the project was ingloriously cancelled on 13 May.

The sting of rejection must be unbearable for Melissa, for so many reasons. First, it was starting to look as if a celebrity could get any old cack funded through Kickstarter if they had a big enough fanbase, and she's the first to discover that this isn't the case. Second, her Kickstarter page repeatedly alluded to her frustration with the film industry – it's full of lines like "I am asking you to do what Hollywood won't, and that is to take a chance on me", and "Hollywood execs … have caused a stumbling block in my path" – and now she's seen another path shut down, all the while being reminded that she isn't even as beloved as the whiny bloke from Scrubs.

Of course, this had to happen at some point. While celebrity involvement might be one of the main draws of startups like this, it doesn't mean users are necessarily interested in every single celebrity. People might join Twitter to hear from Stephen Fry, for example, but it doesn't mean that they want to read Dean Gaffney's tweets as well. And, in truth, there's only a very small sliver of time between someone joining Instagram to look at Rihanna's bum and deleting Instagram because they're tired of looking at Rihanna's bum. So it is with Kickstarter – you might think that celebrity projects have an unfair advantage, but it quite clearly depends on the celebrity and what they do.

This isn't to say that Hart should give up on Kickstarter altogether, though. Her big mistake was thinking that people care about her as an actor. She was wrong; they only care about one specific TV show that she made as an actor more than a decade ago. Darci's Walk of Shame might be dead in the water, but Sabrina the Teenage Witch: The Motion Picture is another thing entirely. All she'd need to do would be to write "I'm making a Sabrina movie! The 90s LOL!" – and maybe throw in a gif of that robot cat rolling its eyes – and she'd be raking it in by teatime.

But perhaps this needed to happen. Perhaps we needed to throw Hart under the bus before all the other semi-remembered child actors from 20 years ago decided to fund a movie of their own with Kickstarter. It might be a hard pill for Hart to swallow now, but it's absolutely worth it if it stops Dustin Diamond from ever pitching Screech: The Lonely Middle-Aged Years.